Global "Last Mile" Performance Stats Going Public

Ookla, the company behind Speedtest.net, Pingtest.net, and the bandwidth testing apps deployed at many ISPs, has gone public with Net performance stats from 1.5 billion users (and counting). Their Net Index page displays download speed, upload speed, and connection "quality" from the EU and the G8, to countries, worldwide cities, and US states. Beginning today, the company is also making detailed (anonymized) data available to academics. "Ookla will also start surveying users about how much they pay for broadband and how much bandwidth they were promised by their ISPs. The results of those questions will go into building a Value Index, which will show how much people around the world pay per megabit-per-second for Internet access. In addition, by collecting postal codes from Speedtest users, Ookla hopes to map broadband service to local economic conditions, Apgar said. The Speedtest data could give the US government far more information to work with in setting priorities for its National Broadband Plan..."

Comments

Hmmmm...

[OrwellianLurker]

The Speedtest data could give the US government far more information to work with in setting priorities for its National Broadband Plan..."

I wonder if we'll give away billions to ISPs without getting anything in return again.

The US looks pretty terrible.

[Miros]

US is not in the top 10, couple of cities in the top 50 of those for download, none in upload? Is the USA really that far behind the curve, or is there another explanation?

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[not flu]

I was under the impression that there were people in the US with no house, too.

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[pesho]

Yes it is. Based on my experience in US and EU (including some of the East European countries that score high on the list), US is an expensive dump as far as internet access goes. The reason: there is competition and free enterprise out there unlike US. If you go in one of these eastern europe countries you get to choose from DSL, WiMAX, Cable and even ethernet cable strung from the local 'mom & pop' garage operation.

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[v1]

The US's upload speed has always stunk. Makes it impractical for most casual admins to run a small private server for friends or even personal use. Stinks when you want to remote to your house to grab a file, where you have 20mbps downstream, and only 768kbps upstream and it just takes forever to grab the file.

Or you can get your wallet totally shafted by your isp if they do offer higher tiers of upstream. Double your speed usually triples to quadruples your monthly cost, and you're usually starting from dirt. (256k to at best 2m)

I pay three times the usual rate at my house because I want their "premium" 2mbps (1.5 actual) instead of the totally useless 384k. (and that's with 10-20m down being standard)

That's an annoying racket they have going with upstream. Problem is, the majority of people that really need high upstream are businesses that need it for employee offsite email and remoting into work, uploading files to customers, etc. So ISPs milk you hard because they expect you to have money to burn.

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[twoallbeefpatties]

The U.S. generally considers itself to be technologically advanced compared to other nations and believes that it helps to drive our economy and keep people in their houses. If it were to turn out that we actually aren't the best in the world at technological issues... well, actually, we'll probably just deny it and say that we are and whine about our lack of population density making it hard to build more infrastructure.

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[EdIII]

we'll probably just deny it and say that we are and whine about our lack of population density making it hard to build more infrastructure.

What part about that is untrue though?

People love to bring up Japan and South Korea and how fast their infrastructure is, but I don't see why it is not valid to bring up the disparities in size and population density.

South Korea is about the size of Kentucky with much higher population density and Japan is 90% of the size of California with roughly about %50 more population density.

Our Internet here is made up a number of competing telecoms and transit/peering agreements work great..... but when you have to keep putting fiber runs that are longer than the entire countries of South Korea and Japan why is it any big surprise that bandwidth costs more in the US?

I think it is just a fact that in order to connect up our urban areas with fiber to each other we have to make significantly longer runs to pull it off with less potential sources of revenue per mile of fiber than countries that are apparently "better than us".

It's not about national pride or some ego competition here. I just think you can't compare the US with other countries on a 1:1 basis. Especially when in some countries they are already started out with the new technology.

I think for what we have to work with we are doing pretty damn good. Our big problems stem from corruption, lack of competition, and Big Media trying to own the pipes and the content being pushed on it.

Even if all of "that" was fixed tomorrow we would still be faced with huge fiber runs all across the country that need to be made in order to keep up with demand.

Internet is not just the only issue either. The fragile state of our Interstates and bridges also has size and density a factor in them too. I am much less impressed with Germany having an awesome Autobahn system given their size compared to us. Now if the US had an Autobahn system? Wow.

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[mcrbids]

Compare the United States to Canada, which has less population density than the United States and generally higher connection speeds.

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[Solandri]

The vast majority of Canada is unpopulated or sparsely populated. 90% of Canadians live in a 200 km strip along the U.S. border. Distance from Vancouver to Halifax is 4443 km, giving a 200 km strip an area of 888,600 sq km (which includes a lot of water, but ignore that). Canada's population is 33.2 million, 90% of that is 29.8 million. So 90% of Canadians live in a population density of 33.5 ppl / sq km. The U.S. has a population density of 32.1 ppl / sq km.

From net index site, the U.S. has an average connection speed of 10.16 Mbps. Canada has an average connection speed of 7.89 Mbps.

Re:Good but still not complete

[Kenoli]

$100/month apparently.

NOT Speedtest.com, Pingtest.com

[pgn674]

The addresses are Speedtest.net and Pingtest.net. And yeah, I checked to make sure I got the capitalization correct.

speedtest.com is a squatter, and pingtest.com redirects to bandwidthplace.com, which looks awfully shady. Whois says it was registered by proxy, the Better Business Bureau has no record on that phone number, and neither does Google.

What cool content are you using bandwidth for? TV?

[billstewart]

The reason to have high bandwidth is to do cool stuff with it. 14kbps was fine for email, then 384 for average web, then 1.5M for Napster and gaming, 3 Mbps seems to be plenty to run YouTube and BitTorrent.

The carriers that want to sell me high-speed connections are doing it so they can sell me television, and I've got plenty of television already. When Napster was new, the public position of the cable modem companies was "Content Thieves are EEEVIL", but if you talked to them privately, most of them had enough clue to say "Dude, Napster's the reason people are buying cable modems, we love it!" But these days they don't have anything new and cool to offer, and they're cluelessly talking about bandwidth caps and no-servers-at-home policies to make sure nobody develops anything new or cool.

So what are you doing with your bandwidth that's interesting? I've heard that old people in Korea can use it to look at video from their local grocery store to see what's on sale, but I haven't heard of anything else interesting.

What?

[ratboy666]

I keep having that reaction... Did you not READ the fine article?

The speed test is pretty much "point to point". In my neighbourhood, it is between Scarborough Ontario and Markham Ontario (Canada).

The speed tester automatically picks the nearest server for you, even.

So, it DOESN'T MATTER HOW BIG THE COUNTRY IS. Peering arrangements shouldn't be coming into it either.

By all that is holy, I would expect San Jose to have some damn fine speeds.

I am embarrassed that the Scarborough speeds are so slow.

All right, let's do a fair comparison

[Atmchicago]

So then compare Canada with the Northeast Corridor (Boston, New York City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Delaware, Baltimore, DC, Richmond).